Adventures in profiling

The New York Times wins the saggy pants headline contest with "The Boxer Rebellion". It's about the current mini-craze to outlaw thug-style fashion in some cities. I have no idea why we would want to outlaw this fashion statement. How you dress says a lot about a person, and in this case it says "I'm a ridiculous person who's wasting my time, and I'll probably waste yours". Isn't it better to know that in the two seconds it takes to see a person instead of the five minutes it might take talking to him?

We should be encouraging this sort of behavior instead of outlawing it. This is America, and time is valuable.

Kudos to CNN.com

I'm linked from their From the Blogs Section on this story.

An interesting article in the New Yorker

Check out Parallel Play by Tim Page, about a life with Aspberger syndrome. I've got most of these personality traits (and other characteristics) but several orders of magnitude less severe.

The funniest thing I've read today

While getting my credit report in advance of the new mortgage

Should you wish to contact TransUnion, you may do so

Wow! Why do they feel it's necessary to put that there?

Ace in the Hole

I finished watching Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole last night. Kirk Douglas stars as a cynical reporter who turns a minor accident into a major tragedy for his own benefit. Excellent work all around.

A riduculous commentary on America

The most controversial Attourney General in years resigns and the main headline everywhere is an athlete's admission of guilt. WTF?

Pirates are the new ninjas

Check out the Hipster Olympics.

Very well put

From Zeldman on designing on spec

Design is only partly decoration. Mainly it is problem solving. Unless the RFP spells out site goals and user needs in phenomenal detail, you can’t create an appropriate design because you don’t yet know what problems need to be solved.

Now I find out...

After complaining for years about how I have nothing in common with my neighbors, today I find out that one of my neighbor's loves to talk politics and is a fellow Ron Paul supporter. Pesky lopsided timing...

To hunt the house you have to think like a house

I went out with Jim (the Realtor) for the first time today and found a couple good prospects, one of which I really liked. We also discovered that there is a ton of crap in East Atlanta, including what seemed like an operational crackhouse for sale. The term "No disclosure" is a big one on property listings.

This hairstyle is called the Fascist

Check out this piece on youth hairstyles Iranian state TV. There's a bizarre amount of KISS footage. My favorite quote from the comments

Ironically Gene Simmons has had at least 72 virgins and he didn't even have to martyr himself.

Scary quote of the day

From the AJC article Clayton may seek records on all renters

"This is not to say Big Brother is watching," he insisted. "It says Big Brother is helping."

It's not the most intrusive thing that could happen, but bear in mind that in the past 10 years we (the Atlanta Metro Area) have had

• 1 Mayor in jailed on corruption charges
  
• 1 political assassination of a sheriff
  
• 1 ex-sheriff convicted of said assassination, along with several deputies
• 1 police shooting of an 87 year old woman based on a perjured warrant
• The creation of a "Tupac Shakur Arts Center" funded by the taxpayers
• Cynthia McKinney's entire political career

And we should give the government more power?

I try something new

In accordance with 37 Signals design methodology, I'm designing a new application by designing the interface first. I'll keep everyone posted.

The project is currently called Socializer, it's based (somehow) on Bill Clinton's early networking style.

Meaningless op-eds masquerading as human interest stories

From the CNN.com article: Muslim women: My headscarf is not a threat after telling a story about rudeness at Walmart while wearing a hijab (which they put in quotation marks for some reason).

Such stories are not altogether uncommon for Muslim Americans.

Wow, not altogether uncommon! I guess it's not unlike a problem of variable merit. There's also the annoying use of the term Muslim American (implying ethnicity or nationality) instead of American Muslim.

The rest of the story is of dubious logic and follows the same pattern as all other CNN.com stories about group identity, which is

1. An offensive incident
2. A quote of data after some seemingly arbitrary date
3. Quote from expert
4. Further interview with subject, telling everyone that he/she wants to be different while remaining the same.
   

Funniest description of my musical ability

From the quite talented (both technically and in performance) Keith Lokey last night

"Your voice isn't very good, but it is appropriate".

Google power

On Friday I created my post on the new NineRodessa.com site. Monday morning I hear from the client that the post is showing up third on Google. Things have changed considerably since the Yahoo and Alta Vista Days.

A handy link for househunters

It seems that one can search country property records online, Dekalb County (Georgia) is here.

NineRodessa.com website!

Ever since I went in business for myself (5 years ago now) my largest client has been Nine Rodessa. And we've talked about doing a new website since then; happily other projects have taken priority and there has never been enough time to actually build the site. At long last the site has been created and built. It's a fine mix of high-end design, Flash video and Ajax, all administered via a lovely content administration system. For this type of work I think it's the finest I've ever done.

Check it out.

Your tax dollars at work

In the form of a brazen retirement scam at the Fulton County Clerks office. Basically the old clerk retires and her successor hires her back at $55 an hour.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution learned through open-records requests and interviews that Hicks is working without a contract, that her new job has no written goals or deadlines and has delivered no tangible work product in six months of employment.

All this and the roads aren't fixed.

Wisdom from the Agitator

From his post on America and Life Expectancy

The United States counts all births as live if they show any sign of life, regardless of prematurity or size. This includes what many other countries report as stillbirths. In Austria and Germany, fetal weight must be at least 500 grams (1 pound) to count as a live birth; in other parts of Europe, such as Switzerland, the fetus must be at least 30 centimeters (12 inches) long. In Belgium and France, births at less than 26 weeks of pregnancy are registered as lifeless. And some countries don't reliably register babies who die within the first 24 hours of birth. Thus, the United States is sure to report higher infant mortality rates.

The other factor here is that thanks to our access to medical technology, we're more likely to try to save premature deliveries that in other countries would result in stillbirths or miscarriages. So every time an infant dies in the U.S. that would never have been born alive (or counted as born alive) in other countries, it registers as a life that died at the age of "zero." That's a pretty significant downward-tug on the national life expectancy.

...

I'd actually like to see where we rank in average life expectancy from, say, the age of 30 or 35 onward. I couldn't find any such data, but it seems to me that would factor out much of the homicide problem, would negate the problems with how we measure infant mortality, and would probably result in a better showing for the U.S.

All quite true.

A short adage

Julian Sanchez comes up with a new term, the Outsight, defined as the opposite of insight, further defined as an

elementary point that everyone else had taken for granted as a premise of the conversation, and indeed, one too obvious to be worth stating.

Tuesday link clearing festival

• Noir is a new club/restaurant in Atlanta that just opened up, decorated entirely in a film noir motif. They have movie nights too. Sounds perfect for me. The AJC review is here.
  
• WikiBroker and Zillow seem quite handy as well. The Zillow link is set to where I am thinking about moving.
• Robert Patterson (a blogger new to me) posts this excellent link to the Battle of Algiers.
• The Chinese ARE building the first affordable electric cars! Which is one of my predictions from a while back.
• Curiously underreported story about Global Warming.

  These graphs were created by NASA's Reto Ruedy and James Hansen (who shot to fame when he accused the administration of trying to censor his views on climate change). Hansen refused to provide McKintyre with the algorithm used to generate graph data, so McKintyre reverse-engineered it. The result appeared to be a Y2K bug in the handling of the raw data. . . .
  
  NASA has now silently released corrected figures, and the changes are truly astounding. The warmest year on record is now 1934. 1998 (long trumpeted by the media as record-breaking) moves to second place. 1921 takes third. In fact, 5 of the 10 warmest years on record now all occur before World War II.

• PurpleSlog responds to my 8 Random Facts Question. His blog tagline is now "Accepting the World As It Is Until Robots Get Better"
  

Random links from the laptop

• Christianity and China - history is going to be interesting for a long time to come.
• Confessions of a BBC Liberal - The politics of it aren't terribly interesting, but the illustration of groupthink is. It would be interesting to see a breakdown of party affiliation by profession.
• Nerds One and Two: The Hyperwhite - It seems that someone did research on nerdiness. Some choice excerpts -

  Nerdiness, she has concluded, is largely a matter of racially tinged behavior. People who are considered nerds tend to act in ways that are, as she puts it, “hyperwhite.”

  ...

  In a 2001 paper, “The Whiteness of Nerds: Superstandard English and Racial Markedness,” and other works, including a book in progress, Bucholtz notes that the “hegemonic” “cool white” kids use a limited amount of African-American vernacular English; they may say “blood” in lieu of “friend,” or drop the “g” in “playing.” But the nerds she has interviewed, mostly white kids, punctiliously adhere to Standard English.

  The author seems not to realize that the appeal of hyper-proper English is that the rules are memorable and never change, which reduces the aren't tied to a peer group to stay current. That's my theory anyway.
  

Jury Duty Again!

And only two years after the last time.

And question #4 on the questionnaire (along with name, address, etc) is "Are you Hispanic?"

Weird.

The rest of the Chicago photos

I've finished processing the pictures from my small Canon camera from the Chicago trip. I wasn't able to bring the big Nikon into the event, so this gallery consists of the road photos and the non-closeups of the Crossroads Guitar Festival.

As you might guess from the quantity of photos, there was a long wait outside Buddy Guy's nightclub.

Check out the gallery.

Some of the Chicago photos are up

I could only bring my small Canon to the actual festival. Here are some of the shots I took with the big Nikon. All of the Superman stuff is from Metropolis Illinois, where they do in fact have a 30 foot high Superman statue, as well as endless fields of corn.

Check out the Gallery.

The report of silence

It didn't work for very long. Working without music focused my attention for several hours, but after that my attention span dropped. A good experiment nonetheless.

The sounds of silence

In the spirit of the books Getting Things Done and the Four Hour Workweek, I'm attempting to go an entire day of working in silence. I'll let you know how it goes.

Thoughts on the surge and ethnic cleansing

While it's common now to hear reports of the surge working, I'm curious to know how much the drop in violence correlates to the ethnic cleansing that's been happening in Iraq for the past few years. All of the Iraqi on Iraqi violence is purposeful, i.e. designed to drive the Sunni out of Shia neighborhoods and vice versa. What if the militias and insurgents are just wrapping up the ethnic cleansing and there's no one handy to kill?

I imagine it's hard to find mixed neighborhoods these days, which would make the murders and bombings more difficult to commit. A good way to test the theory would be to see if inter-ethnic violence increases as extra-ethnic violence decreases. The recent tribal push against AQ is some evidence of that as without readily available Shia AQ has nothing to offer the Sunni tribes.

So many questions, so little data. I guess another way of putting it is "what if Iraq completed it's civil war while everyone was debating the meaning of "Civil War"? (note, I still dislike the term to refer to the conflict, Gang war is the better term.).

What I'm reading while uploading...

• Hardcore Troubadours - a bio of the Old Crow Medicine Show
• Catalogs of Data Visualization on Coding Horror
• Minorities become the majority in 10 percent of U.S. counties - which has the interesting quote

  In northern Virginia, Teresita Jacinto said she feels less welcome today than when she first arrived 30 years ago, when she was one of few Hispanics in the area.

  "Not only are we feeling less welcome, we are feeling threatened," said Jacinto, a teacher in Woodbridge, Virginia, about 20 miles southwest of Washington.
  ...
  "I think across the board all of us feel like we're not welcome," said Jacinto, who was born in the U.S. and volunteers for an advocacy group called Mexicans Without Borders.

  Perhaps it's because she's feeling unwelcome because she's advocating an unpopular cause?

• The Old Crow Medicine Show on AT & T Blueroom
• Green Fakers on Radar. The celebrity excuses are funny.
  

Cell phone advice

I'm thinking of getting a Blackberry 8700G. Does anyone know anything about this phone? I would like to use it as a secondary internet connection as well as a phone/pda.

Nuking Mecca would be counterproductive and silly

I listened to the Republican Debate from Sunday and heard Tom Tancredo repeat his strategy of nuking Mecca if terrorists launch another attack on the United States. It's just silly. Everyone is sold on the notion that religions are "of" something, like peace or justice.

Nuking Mecca is a way of fighting on technicalities and hoping that the other side believes in them as much as we would like them to. It's like trying to fight LSD use by threatening to build a Starbucks on Jim Morrison's gravesite.

Monday rapid fire

• Al Gore goes Geothermal
• Dallas Swat (it's a reality TV show apparantly) officer arrested for having sex with prostitute.
• Firefox Tune Up program
  

Double weirdness

• The quest for alternative energy seems to have caused an earthquake. In Switzerland no less. Overall it's cool though.
• The dirty car art gallery - a guy actually does fine artwork on dirty cars. See to believe.
  

The United States of Baseball and Florida

Here are two from Interesting Maps - the United States of Baseball and Florida. Note the White Sox.

Addendum to the Grateful Dead post

I came across this interview with Ann Coulter on JamBands.com, evidently she's quite the fan. Favorite Quote:

Moreover, I really like Deadheads and the whole Dead concert scene: the tailgating, the tie-dye uniforms, the camaraderie – it was like NASCAR for potheads

Most interesting fact

My collection of Dead tapes, by the way, was the reason I heard one of the Linda Tripp tapes before Ken Starr did. Tripp's lawyer obviously needed to hear the tape before turning it over to the prosecutor, but he only had an old 1950's tape player and couldn't get it to work and Ken Starr wanted the tape the next morning. He was terrified he'd hit the wrong button and erase the evidence. In the wee hours of the morning, it occurred him, a Deadhead himself, that he knew one person in D.C. who definitely had a tape machine. So, at around 2 AM, he called me and asked to come over to use my tape deck.

Friday in appreciation, volume III

I was in Chicago last week so I didn't get a chance to do the in appreciation post, but here is this week's.

This week's in appreciation is the Grateful Dead. While I'm not a huge fan of the music (I love Old and in the Way, and the Jerry Garcia Acoustic Band is quite good) they stand out as true American icons, especially for artists. Not only did they commit to a style of music and a style of life, they created it first. And seemingly with the attitude that it's better to have a small achievement than a great excuse (to paraphrase Hoffer). They spend 30 years doing what they wanted to do without asking favors or permission. Contrast that to the Live 8 and the Live Earth crowd and they become a marvel.

So, Grateful Dead, you get this week's In Appreciation.

Quick links while uploading

An assortment of things I've read while I've been uploading things today

• The golden age of Chicago prostitution - The Everleigh sisters are respoinsible for the term "get laid". An interesting read - the more things change...
• Rifle Robots!
• John Allen Paulos has a new book out soon, I think it's going to a more civil (and knowing Paulos well written and interesting) version of the recent Richard Dawkins screed. My favorite blurb from the Amazon page "A Lifelong Unbeliever Finds No Reason to Change His Mind"
• How to build your business without quitting your day job
• Firefox tune-ups
• Conan O'Brian hates my homeland - favorites

  Brazil
  Home to more than 800 species of unregulated breast implants.
  
  Burkina Faso
  In the traditional tribal language, that's Burkina for "land of" and Faso for "people who want to get the hell out of Burkina Faso."
  
  Colombia
  You'll come for the enticing beauty of the Caribbean Sea. You'll stay because you've been kidnapped and locked in the trunk of a Dodge Dart.
  
  East Timor
  It takes a lot to admit you live on the bad side of Timor.

Sorry for the light blogging

Work has been insane lately. I should have the Chicago photos posted soon.

Violent youth bulges

From this article in the Financial Times

when 15 to 29-year-olds make up more than 30 per cent of the population, violence tends to happen; when large percentages are under 15, violence is often imminent. The "causes" in the name of which that violence is committed can be immaterial. There are 67 countries in the world with such "youth bulges" now and 60 of them are undergoing some kind of civil war or mass killing.

Read the whole thing.

Restless Leg Syndrome

The Freakonomics guys have a post on Restless Leg Syndrome. Virginia Postrel comments

If something is a "disease," it is worth treating. If it isn't a "disease," you should just live with it. But why? Why not treat a biological condition you just don't like? (I'm assuming that you are directly or indirectly paying for the treatment.) We don't have to call Restless Leg Syndrome a disease to acknowledge that it disturbs some people's sleep and that those people would like relief. Contrary to what you may have heard, the only sort of character suffering builds is the ability to suffer--a useful ability in a world where suffering is the routine nature of life but not a virtue that makes the world a better place.

RLS is hardly the worst thing that one can have, but why not use all that modern society has to offer.